As rumored, Facebook has changed the company name to Meta. The new company name was announced at the Facebook Connect Augmented and Virtual Reality conference and it reflects the company’s growing ambitions beyond social media. The company also announced that the stock ticker will be changed from FB to MVRS with effect from December 1. The Meta’s stock price closed up on Thursday. The rebranding of Facebook to Meta is just like Google rebranded itself under Alphabet, which is doing smart things in innovations.
Meta plans to invest in AR,AI Virtual Reality, Smart Glasses and much more in the upcoming future. The transformation is essential to the survival of the company due to the latest trends in technologies. Previously, there were rumors about the name change but the company declined to respond to queries.
Commenting on the development, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg disclosed that even though we are a social media company but we build new technology that connect people across boundaries. The metaverse is the next frontier just like social networking when the company started its operations. Zuckerberg added that the metaverse will reach a billion people within the next decade. The platform is expected to host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce with support for millions of creators and developers.
The company has ramped up its efforts in hardware by introducing a wide range of Portal video-calling devices. The company launched the Ray-Ban Stories glasses and rolling out various versions of the Oculus virtual-reality headsets. The product team revealed that Augmented and Virtual Reality will be a key part of its strategy in the coming years. The company said that they will spend about $10 billion over the next year to develop technologies required for building the metaverse.
Zuckerberg also presented a short demo of the company’s ambitions for the metaverse. The demo looked like a Pixar-like animation of software that the company is planning to build. The demo showed users hanging out in space as cartoon-like versions of either themselves or fantastical characters such as a robot, that represent virtual shelves. The Facebook CEO also took a dig at other tech firms of stifling innovation with high developer fees. He added that the elements of the metaverse has a potential to become mainstream in 5 to 10 years. The company is gearing up to invest billions in the upcoming years until the metaverse reaches scale. The company believes that the metaverse will be the successor to the mobile Internet.
Meta announced a new Virtual Reality headset named Project Cambria with higher price than the competing products. The headset is expected to launch in 2022. The company also revealed Project Nazare, which is the code name of its first fully AR-capable smart glasses. However, the official launch will be delayed and is expected to happen by middle of 2022.
The company took to Twitter and revealed that the name of apps such as Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp will remain the same. Meta exists before as is evident from the official Twitter handle, which was created in 2007. The official Meta Twitter handle has over 13.5M followers on Twitter. Hence, the formation of the company is not new. However, Meta was doing product-centric projects but now will be part of social media as well. The formation of Meta is not new since it exists since last 14 years. The company is rapidly focusing on innovations and we can expect trending Gadgets, which will change the way we communicate with others in the years to come.
